Aside from wicd it seems the last dist upgrade also ripped out gxine,mplayer,mozilla-mplayer and some associated libs. can anyone else confirm.

Not here erie, using only sid repos.

deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://ftp.gr.debian.org/debian/"
linktext was:"http://ftp.gr.debian.org/debian/"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false unstable main contrib non-free
deb
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.debian-multimedia.org"
linktext was:"http://www.debian-multimedia.org"
====================================
" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false unstable main

"unstable" Sid is more stable than Testing Lenny at the moment, huh? No wonder that Lenny has not been released, even though it is October! __{{emoticon}}__ Of course, Testing is usually pretty solid, but as the guys are trying to package and set it up for the next stable release, to be completed any time now, they may be taking some pieces apart and putting them back together again. Perhaps Sid is the place to be for a while - with the help of smxi, of course!